Performance Analysis of Joint Adaptive Modulation and Diversity Combining Over Fading Channels

Both adaptive modulation and diversity combining represent important enabling techniques for future generations of wireless communication systems. In this paper, capitalizing on recent developments in adaptive combining, we propose three joint adaptive modulation and diversity combining (AMDC) schemes. With these schemes, the modulation mode and diversity combiner structure are adaptively determined based on the fading channel condition and error-rate requirement. We accurately analyze these three AMDC schemes in terms of processing power consumption, spectral efficiency, and error-rate performance. Selected numerical examples show that the proposed AMDC systems meet the target error-rate requirement while achieving high spectral efficiency with low processing power consumption